A. J. Jacobs gave what is now a well-known TED talk on My Year of Living the Bible in December 2007. He turned the speech into a book entitled: The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible. This book was on the NYT bestseller’s list for three months.
A. J. Jacobs, who is an agnostic, did this experiment for one year. Here is the reason for his experiment: “I'm concerned about the rise of religious fundamentalism, and people who say they take the Bible literally, which is, according to some polls, as high as 45 or 50 percent of America. So, I decided, what if you really did take the Bible literally? I decided to take it to its logical conclusion and take everything in the Bible literally, without picking and choosing.”
Here is his first takeaway from one year of seeking to prove the Bible cannot be taken literally: “The first is, thou shalt not take the Bible literally. This became very, very clear, early on. Because if you do, then you end up acting like a crazy person and stoning adulterers.” Notice that Jacobs does not refute the stoning of adulterers in the Old Testament, he simply makes an accusation that is not an answer to the apparent problem.
There is an important principle of Bible interpretation that would clear up this alleged problem of the literal interpretation of Scripture. That principle of hermeneutics or interpretation is progressive revelation, which simply means that God continued to give additional revelation throughout the writing of Scripture. For example, God’s chosen people in the Old Testament was the nation of Israel. When Jesus came and offered the Old Testament prophesied kingdom and himself as king to the nation, Israel rejected him. In response, Jesus postponed the kingdom and set aside the nation of Israel temporarily. The church today is the people of God not the nation of Israel. While God gave commanded capital punishment for certain sins in the Old Testament with the nation of Israel, God does not command the church to put to death its members for any sin. God still takes sin just as seriously today as He did in the Old Testament. Progressive revelation reveals that according to 1 Corinthians 5, the church does not stone adulterers in this age but rather the church disciplines them.
Progressive revelation also reveals that there are important distinctions in Scripture. One major distinction is that the nation of Israel was the people of God in the Old Testament but the Church is the people of God today. Some sins that were capital offenses in the Old Testament with the nation are not capital offenses in the church because the church is not a nation. The same sins, however, are still to be taken seriously. God did change His standard of holiness just His method of dealing with sin.